Uselessness

by Eduardo Lalo

  3

  With summer, Paris came to life again, but all the bustling felt alien, part of the lives of others. I remained, in my head, on this side of the Atlantic, with a sensation of anxiety and depression that never left me, not knowing how to fill my days. I thought both of returning and not returning to Puerto Rico. The idea of another year in this state crushed my energy, which was already diminished by Marie’s disappearance. I couldn’t get her suffering out of my mind, or the foundation of the bridge that she had begun to build toward me the day of our last encounter.

  I ended up telling the whole story to Simone. One Sunday we went for a walk along the islands on the Seine and stopped to sit on a bench facing Notre Dame. My tale took up over an hour, and even though our relationship hadn’t felt intimate until that moment, I didn’t find in her the indifference of ready-made answers. Finally she said that I seemed so fragile that she was afraid to touch me.

  We started seeing each other more often. We’d go to the movies, chasing down in distant quartiers reruns of old movies, which a certain sector of the public had not forgotten. We’d go to Sylvie and Hamed’s apartment in the Tenth to have dinner; we’d sit down to chat beside the ponds and along the promenades in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She was right: I could have collapsed at any moment. I felt I was living in a void, and what I perhaps didn’t want to admit to myself was that I dreaded what could happen between us. I’d watch her reclining on a chair with her eyes closed and her skirt raised to get some sun on her legs after winter, and I endlessly went back over my doubts. In spite of a certain grace, Simone wasn’t a beautiful woman, but I was fascinated by her inexhaustible energy and deep roots in the city, her universe of tastes and tendencies, so different from my own, and yet I held back, which, I hoped, wouldn’t offend her.

  Absurdly it was hard to watch her trying to pull me out of my doldrums with her playful and irreverent talk, with the persistent display of her naked body beneath sheer cotton fabrics, with her way of not taking me seriously and reproaching me for being gloomy. One day, compelled by desire and loneliness, I put my hand between her thighs. They were slender and welcoming. She changed her position, barely shifting, before pressing her hands on mine and squeezing her legs. We stood up and walked with our arms around each other’s waist. We kissed under a tree on the promenade and I felt her buoyant breasts quiver against my chest.

  Of all the love affairs I’ve had, the one that brought Simone and me together was both the most fleeting and the only one I recall without bitterness. That evening, in my studio, we made love with an intensity I could not recall ever feeling before. Simone was all about skin, whether rubbing against a body or against furniture; clothes were like a wrapping in which her body would swim. Her flesh and muscles palpitated, moving in constant defiance and enrichment of the laws of gravity. She didn’t know shame. She could sit down to eat, carry on the most incredible conversations, read or write for hours, without covering herself, without showing any modesty or embarrassment. Her body made any place its home.

  That was the summer of the parks. I’d pick her up at the cheap hotel where she worked cleaning rooms and making beds and we’d wander around the open spaces of the city. We agreed to save up for a vacation and would economize by buying strawberries, cherries, bread, cheese, and salads, which we’d consume in parks, on terraced steps and in squares. We’d stop and stand in the chalk circles drawn by street artists, we’d listen to the old Revolutionary songs played on a hand organ on one of the bridges of the Île Saint-Louis. Simone knew them all and sang and danced to them, tilting her body, barely moving, receiving the knowing look of the two men singing who knew her since childhood. In the vast Beaubourg plaza I’d insist that we listen to the Andean ensembles or the bands of drums from Senegal and the Congo. We’d sit on the dirty ground littered with cigarette butts, wrappings, and empty bottles to watch the spectacle of the man with the deep hoarse voice who earned a living by putting out live coals with his tongue and spitting out huge flames, or we’d admire the skill of the jugglers, comics, or the youngsters, always different ones, who had come to Paris with a guitar.

  Sundays we’d go to an apartment near the Gare de Lyon to have lunch with her father. The place was small and gloomy. Georges would drag one leg and move by straining on aluminum crutches whose bottoms were stained by dirt from the street. With our help he’d prepare traditional stews, bouillabaisses, blood sausage puddings from Auvergne. Her father would always serve a red table wine, which he’d pour for everyone, generously, until the last drop. The dining room was filled with a big cloud of smoke, which couldn’t escape through the tiny windows. After dessert, Georges would painstakingly go over to the sideboard, a lit Gitanes dangling between his lips, and bring over a bottle of eau-de-vie. The harsh liqueur hit the stomach, leaving a trail of heat starting from the tongue. Simone and I would end up lying on the couch, gulping down a last glass, smoking one more cigarette, listening to her father starting to snore in his easy chair. Starry eyed, Simone would then leap upon me, in a farce or comedy that was repeated every time and that came close to exhibitionism, ending by shocking me and producing a string of insults that would wrap up the game.

  We’d go back to my apartment when the endless twilight would seem to solidify over the still air of the city, when the people around us would be bent on heading home.

  One morning I went to visit Sandrine. Since being involved with Simone I had been avoiding her. Marie’s senseless accusation had made our attempts to communicate ambiguous and awkward. I knew well the capricious and universal susceptibilities of relationships, especially the ones that could be in the process of becoming exclusive. If I caught her on a bad day, Sandrine could see my new relationship as a betrayal of Marie or even of herself. In these matters, logic and fairness were always precarious. All the same, I valued our friendship and didn’t want to lose it. Besides—and perhaps this was what moved me also to visit her—I wanted to know if she had news of Marie.

  She had received a letter. She gave it to me to read and I looked for the return address. Marie had written it from the family beach house. She recounted the odyssey of the first days there, the fury that had turned into resignation, exposing the contradictions of her relationship with the mother. She had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital for two weeks and for over a month had been living in her house on the Upper East Side. She liked her psychiatrist, and the medications had helped her, but she still didn’t feel well. She would stay home for the summer and then return. Finally, she asked Sandrine to tell me that she would write soon. The letter was filled with news but said nothing important. It felt like she was practicing being sane. Sandrine did not agree. She was happy for her friend and told me it wasn’t good (implying that it was very bad) for me to be so suspicious, to see shadows around every corner. Our conversation didn’t go much further. I must have caught her on a bad day.

  Simone and I were planning our vacation. We were vaguely considering places we’d heard about that appealed to us when one day Simone brought from her father’s house an antiquated map of Europe. We spread it out on the bed, spending hours pronouncing the names of all the different places and fabricating impossible itineraries that were more like marathons.

  Our modest savings brought us back down to reality. I longed for the sea and for my native tongue; Spain was fairly close, and, in that era before its entry into the Common Market, it was still a cheap country. We decided to trace straight lines and measure them with a ruler. The lines that went to the east coast of Spain were the shortest. Thus we chose our destination. We would try to stretch our money as far as possible so as to be out of Paris for three weeks, in what we hoped would be a cottage by the sea. Every few days we would venture out to the nearest village or city for a change of pace and atmosphere.

  Hamed and Sylvie lent us a couple of army rucksacks they had used traveling around North Africa; we filled them with our clothes and a few books, bought our tickets, and finally, sitting face-to-face with our
legs entwined, looking out the window of the train, we found ourselves leaving the city. Early the next morning we reached Barcelona, where we planned to stop for a couple of days.

  In the Gothic Quarter we chose the hostel whose sign seemed the most weather-beaten, presuming it would cost the least. Once in our own room, we closed the curtains and began to undress standing up. I could feel the amazing heat in Simone’s thighs, the soft swell of her belly against my cock. We fell upon the bed causing a creak that made us pause and look at each other in wonder. The furniture was very old, the mattress thin and rutted. Any movement started a symphony of squeaking that must have been audible over the whole floor. Hugging and holding each other close, we fell to the floor. The dirt stuck to the sweat on our bodies. Afterwards, as the morning seeped in like liquid beneath the curtains, we fell into an idyllic sleep.

  Later that day we discovered the Ramblas, the Plaça de Catalunya, the towers of the Sagrada Familia, the Sant Jordi church. We walked along the streets near the hostel, taking in the activity of pimps and whores, of dealers in hashish and hard drugs, the Arab and Gypsy enclaves. As the sun set, we made love in the showers of the hostel, wary of any footsteps that drew near, stifling our nervous laughter, moans, and declarations of love.

  Later, dining on gambas al ajillo, leaning on the bar of a café, among Germans and Scandinavians, barely twenty-four hours after our departure, I felt that Paris was far away. In Barcelona we could breathe new, fresher air. No one knew us; nothing had happened to us on these streets, no history weighed us down.

  Everything we needed or wanted was cheap. Espadrilles, packets of unfiltered cigarettes for me, filtered for Simone, a bottle of wine, to which, when the sales clerk told us the price, we quickly added a second. We returned to the hostel late, drunk, and happy to have spent the night discovering the city step by step. All along the dark corridor of the boardinghouse, our hands explored inside each other’s clothes, our fingers anticipating, knowing everything.

  Once Simone was in bed, dead tired and sleepy, I went to drink from the faucet. The wine, the food, the lovemaking had produced an intense, insatiable thirst. Cupping my hands, I drank at length. The water tasted bad, of salt, of metal. Finally, I fell into the bed that creaked and swayed me like a pendulum.

  After two intense and marvelous days, we got up very late. We walked out into a blinding sun. The heat, which in Paris had never had this intensity, was overwhelming. Wandering around the streets, with our clothes soaked, it was so hard to breathe that we were gasping. Nothing tasted right that day, neither the coffee nor the cigarettes nor each other’s lips. Simone bared the claws of her bad mood. Realizing we were lost (we didn’t have a map and it wasn’t easy to find one’s way), she directed her fury at me in florid slang. Soon we were fighting, slinging insults that flew out of our mouths like surprises, driving our bodies apart.

  We sat back to back under a tree (in a park we never did identify), a big space between us. I turned to watch her smoke, concentrating with a face that made me imagine her childhood tantrums. After the third cigarette smoothed her brow, her eyes met mine and she finally laughed. We made up then and there as we would do many times, in the delicious way lovers do.

  We decided to extend our stay in Barcelona for one more day. The city’s relaxed contrast with the formality of Paris made us feel like we were on vacation. I insisted upon spending a little time in a museum, though Simone didn’t share my enthusiasm. She wandered through the rooms of medieval Catalan art and didn’t stay with me when I’d stop in front of paintings, sculptures, and altarpieces. When I’d turn to comment on something, hoping to interest her in the art and ease my worry over her boredom, I wouldn’t find her in the gallery. She was two centuries of painting ahead, unmoved by the wonders that surrounded her, sitting barefoot and with her legs crossed on a circular sofa, ready to ask me if we could leave. I was struck by her indifference. She took culture for granted without wanting it or paying it much attention. She was a graduate student in literature, but already I knew her well enough to presume she would not make it to the final dissertation stage. In the future I could see her working in a nursery school or an administrative position or managing a bouquiniste stall or a gift shop. What work she did really didn’t matter to her. The life she wanted was right in front of her. Unresponsive to the opinions of others on what mattered, she had no ambition. She was satisfied to be the girl who had grown up on the streets of Paris and would always remain on those streets. My artistic aspirations meant nothing to her; Paris had for me a literary aura that said nothing to Simone. She would have preferred me to be simpler, satisfied with a few basic everyday desires, without prospects, spontaneous to the point of oblivion.

  That night, the third in Barcelona, I was slow and tired, wanting to return to the hostel to take a bath and read. However, it was hard to curb Simone’s energy. We’d stop in front of all the outdoor stands on the Ramblas, we’d watch the street players and wander with the river of people flowing through the streets. The queasiness that would erupt in me the next day was being forged.

  We returned to the hostel and I fell asleep almost immediately. There would be no lovemaking gymnastics that night. I had a dream in which Marie appeared. She was sitting on the mattress in my apartment in Paris reading a book with very big pages, and then lifted her eyes and said to me, irritated: “I’m not leaving here.”

  I awoke at dawn’s early light. Simone slept curled up beside me. You could begin to sense the early risers on the street and hear the foghorns in the port. I went to the window and peeked through the curtains. It was a cloudy day, but probably by mid-morning the sun would come out. At eleven thirty we would take the train heading down the coast. We’d buy a ticket as far as Alicante, depending on the landscape we saw out the window: if we saw a place that appealed to us we would get off there and look for a place to stay. It was a risky plan, but we were willing to be adventurous. On the map we had opened in Paris, we saw places with marvelous names: Tabernes de Valldigna, Cabo de la Nao, San Vincente de Paspeig. We imagined an uninhabited peninsula, with a fishing village nearby where we could stock up every few days.

  This prospect filled me with enthusiasm. Sun, sea, a primitive lifestyle, giving full reign to our sexuality: all this gave me hope for a personal rebirth and the awakening of a creative period. I saw myself sitting at a rustic table, barefoot, listening to the waves, writing. We wouldn’t want for anything more; we were filled with illusions, thinking that we were made for this life and that we now had it within reach.

  I felt a vague pain in my abdomen. I dressed and went into the bathroom. I defecated a very liquid diarrhea. I attributed it to the wine, the seafood, and cold cuts. I returned to the room and sat down to read, letting Simone sleep. But before I could even start, I had to return to the toilet several times. I had a headache and felt increasingly unwell.

  I had to pull Simone out of her sleep, insisting on the time and rushing her through the process of packing, getting breakfast, and making it to the station. The café au lait and bread and butter, the free breakfast at the guesthouse, didn’t agree with me at all. Just a few minutes left before our train was leaving, I had to run to look for the restrooms. I already knew the Turkish toilets, having run into them in Paris, but I was not prepared for the spectacle of that train station toilet. The stink, the collective and overflowing excrement, the polluted puddles that covered the floor and got as far as the door, were overwhelming. My condition did not allow for alternatives and I had to squat, struggling to maintain a perilous balance; falling into that muck would be catastrophic. I sacrificed my handkerchief and dragged my shoes to try to wipe off the dirt.

  When I returned to the platform, Simone was shouting from a door. At that moment, the train began to pull away. With my illness and the state of the bathrooms, I had lost track of time. I climbed the steps of the train thinking it would have been better to spend another day in the city.

  It was summer and the trains were crowded. My belly produ
ced sounds and I felt waves of pain that didn’t allow me to keep still. We ended up finding a place at the end of the car, near the bathroom. There I spent hours sitting on the floor or running in every few seconds, amid bundles and suitcases. I became weaker and sicker and the trip turned into an endless torture. Simone managed to get a cup of hot tea, slices of dry bread, and a couple of antidiarrheal pills, thanks to her enterprising attitude and the solidarity of a couple of Swedes. I hoped to feel better and make it to our incomparable beach.

  I was determined and managed to get off at a station whose name I’ve forgotten. Before arriving, we had seen a rocky coast, with sunny little coves and a deep blue sea that seemed unreal to a Caribbean like myself. It was an effort to carry the rucksack. I had a steady pain in the region of my kidneys.

  We walked out of the station and came upon a ghost town. We quickly realized that the area had fallen into the hands of developers who built condominiums that brought little benefit to the town itself, which lay a few kilometers from the coast. The locals remained in the town. The vacationers did not stroll along its streets and basically, upon leaving the station, took taxis to the coast.

  On the highway to the beach, leaving town, we decided to hitchhike. I had taken the rucksack off my back and was practically dragging it as we walked along waiting for a ride. The sun was high and there was no shade anywhere.

  A pickup truck stopped in front of us. Some bricklayers were going in the direction we wanted. We sat in the back amid tools and bags of cement. The half hour trip did me good. We saw, as we got closer, the blue line of the horizon and the apartment towers that were finished or half-built. We got off in front of a modern-style café and I asked the driver if he knew of some cheap place we could stay, some room or cabaña.